23 days

Last Friday, I had an interview for the upcoming Dutch photobook "Children of Their Time", in which seventeen Indonesian adoptees share what adoption has meant in their lives.

Preparing for the interview felt unfamiliar. For a long period, I had stepped away from the intensity of my own history. Something that once ruled my days and nights had slowly begun to loosen its grip.

When I restarted my search in June 2020, rest was almost impossible. While the Netherlands slept, I was awake, messaging people in Indonesia, following leads, comparing fragments of memory, building timelines in my head. Nighttime was the only moment the world around me became quiet enough to focus on the questions that had lived inside me for decades.

During the day, I had to function. Work. Earn money. Survive. Yet everything could feel small compared to the one question that never left me: where is my mother, and who am I in this story? It took a long, painful period of depression to understand a harsh truth: without financial stability, life collapses quickly. So I learned to switch off during office hours. I needed to be practical: I needed an income, even when my heart was somewhere else entirely.

Around three in the morning, my mind came alive. I would connect memories to research, dates to rumours, and documents to feelings. I tried to reconstruct the years before my adoption in chronological order, hoping that structure would finally bring clarity. For a long time, I feared I might be imagining things. Only later did I discover that many of my memories were remarkably accurate.

As a child, I never understood why I had been relinquished. I still struggle with that. I remember being cared for. I remember love. And yes, there were moments of poverty and a period when part of our life unfolded on the streets, but I also remember my mother working hard and believing our situation would only be temporary.

When I reviewed my paperwork again, I saw that my mother was listed as having signed a waiver on 21 July 1979. On 13 August 1979, the court approved the adoption by foreign parents in less than three weeks, or more precisely, within 23 days. In that short window, I was separated from my country, my name, my language, and my family, and within weeks, I was on a plane to the other side of the world.

How could something so permanent be decided so quickly? Why were different standards applied when a child crossed borders? This would never happened in the Netherlands. These questions have never really left me.

My file links me to Pasuruan, near Surabaya, as well as to Yogyakarta, Jakarta, and Lampung in Sumatra. For years, I wondered how a 4-year-old child could carry memories from so many places. Research eventually showed me that remembering did not make me confused or unstable. It made me a witness to a complicated journey.

People often ask whether I ever looked for professional help. I did. But what I longed for was simple: acknowledgement that what I remembered might be real, and space for legitimate doubt about the legality of my adoption. Instead, I frequently encountered systems that could not provide that certainty.

There was also a period when I had no insurance and no money, which made sustained support impossible. Understanding your own origins is not a hobby. It demands time, energy and enormous personal investment. Adoptees are asked to finance searches, therapy, document requests and journeys of return, while the circumstances that created the separation were never of their making.

We inherit the bill for restoring our own identity.

The turning point for me did not come from an institution. It came from people. From my friends and from journalists willing to listen. From being heard and the acknowledgement from them, that my story is indeed complicated. Those moments created breathing space and helped me move forward with my life. Today I stand more firmly than before. The search no longer consumes every hour, but it remains part of me. And if tomorrow a new clue, a new name or a new door appears, I will still be ready to walk through it.

I have learned to live while keeping that door gently open.